


The Destructors

by thisissarcasm



Category: Sherlock (TV)
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-01-09
Updated: 2012-01-09
Packaged: 2017-10-29 06:21:07
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,304
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/316699
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thisissarcasm/pseuds/thisissarcasm
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>“They worked with the seriousness of creators and destruction after all is a form of creation. A kind of imagination had seen this house as it had now become.” –Graham Greene</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Destructors

“So much for not falling off the wagon, yeah?” It was an odd conversation to be having at a crime scene, and John did his best to keep his voice down out of something resembling respect. A woman lay dead in an alleyway within shouting distance, and he imagined that shouting at his drunken sister over the phone would be distasteful at the very least. He could make out the faint sounds of a pub in the background on Harry’s end of the phone. The slur in her voice was unmistakable.

“I’m sorry, John.”

“You say that every time you tell me you’re going to stop drinking,” John said, casting a glance back over his shoulder. He could hear the rhythmic murmur of Sherlock’s voice rattling off details to Lestrade, who was scribbling as much as he could. A crowd of onlookers had begun to gather near the police tape – some of them took photographs with their phones, and John momentarily questioned his attempts not to be disrespectful to the dead.

“But I really am.”

“You always say that, too,” John told her. “A broken record, you are. At Christmas you swore you were done.” Silence on the other end of the line, and John could hear the sound of mugs clanging together amidst the noise of a crowd and a television somewhere in the background.

“I have to go.” It was all he could think to say, and it was the truth as far as he was concerned. He hung up without another word, and turned his attention back to the scene. A coroner’s van had arrived, and two pale looking men were hard at work rolling a gurney out of the back of it. He glanced down at his phone: four minutes, fifteen seconds. That’s all it had taken to inspire anger. Frustration. And just a touch of guilt.

He understood the first two. Harry had always been the one who had no problem acting on whatever it was she wanted and to hell with everyone else. It was how she ended up a drunk, and how Clara had ended up minus a wife. It was how, John thought, he was for the most part without a sister. Anger and frustration made sense.

The guilt was a little more confusing because every time they had that conversation – and there had been multiple “I’m sorry, John” calls over the years – he always felt that same sort of feeling nagging at him, that tug of remorse asking whether he could have done more. That was what made the certainty of life as a doctor and a soldier appealing, after all: there were absolutes. Orders were orders, and dosages were dosages. There was no question of the number of ways he might handle a crisis, only instinct and regulations, and that was fine.

Those rules didn’t apply to his handling of his sister, and he wondered momentarily if it was because she didn’t want to change, or because he, in his own way, wasn’t willing to help her. Though he had grown used to this game over the years, there were nights when it still got to him. Nights when he was standing over a human being dead because of circumstances beyond her control while talking to someone who didn’t seem to care about her health or her life.

John shoved his phone back into his pocket, and steeled himself again. When he rejoined Sherlock, who was still standing over the young woman’s body, he was not surprised when Sherlock didn’t acknowledge his presence. He was knelt low over the dead woman inspecting something John could not make out on her bloodstained jumper.

When Sherlock rose, he turned to Lestrade and said simply, “Open and shut domestic. When you find the husband, you’ll find your murderer. Call me when something interesting turns up.”

John suddenly recalled where his concern for decorum at crime scenes had come from as Sherlock ducked beneath the crime scene tape and past the crowd, leaving him to give an apologetic glance to Lestrade before hurrying along to catch up to the consulting detective.  
Sherlock was half a block down by the time John caught up, and he walked with purpose despite seemingly having solved the crime right there at the scene. Sherlock dug his hands into the pockets of his coat as a bitter wind sliced through the nearly deserted London streets. They were too far from Baker Street to walk, John realized, and Sherlock was not one for leisurely strolls when a cab was readily available.

“I’m sorry, where are we going?” John asked, shivering against the wind.

“I was right about the drinking, wasn’t I,” Sherlock replied, shrugging off the question altogether. “She called you from a pub, and from the tone of your voice, she’d had a few too many. Judging from your rather pronounced scowl, I’d go so far as to wager that she called you on the verge of tears and quite apologetic.”

“Spot on, as usual. But what’s this got to do with not hailing a cab? I’m freezing, Sherlock.”

“Don’t be melodramatic. Your sister excels enough at it for the both of you, don’t you think?” Sherlock took a turn down a side street, and John let the amusement in Sherlock’s voice sink in and piss him off just a bit more than it normally would.

“You think an alcoholic sister is funny,” John said. “Right. Of course.”

“Hardly more amusing than I think a brother with no sense of boundaries would be,” Sherlock shot back. John was out of breath and growing more agitated by the minute, quite possibly because his hands were beginning to go numb even inside his pockets. Sherlock, with the exception of wind-blown cheeks, seemed oblivious to the cold, and he continued moving through the side streets with some unknown purpose.

“And Mycroft’s sense of boundaries won’t kill your liver,” John pointed out.

“Duly noted,” Sherlock said. Another turn, and they halted at a street corner. Sherlock was breathing heavily as well, and John wondered secretly if his willingness to ignore Harry’s drinking problem was his own way of ignoring the issue of substance abuse altogether.

“Here we are, then,” Sherlock muttered, a ghost of a smile creeping across his lips. John glanced up at him, and then followed his gaze across the street to a derelict building standing on the corner.

The only thing illuminating it was a solitary streetlight, perched dutifully on the pavement as though guarding a tomb. The building itself was, from the looks of it, due to collapse on itself at any moment, with hollowed out, lightless windows. There were cracks in the foundation of the building, and John could imagine spirals of moss growing up and weaving through them in the warmer months. Now, they reminded him of bone fractures, and he took pause for a moment to wonder if all of his time spent either at crime scenes or blogging about them had made him morbid.

“Shall we, then?” Sherlock asked. He sniffled against the cold, and turned his gaze to John.

“Shall we what, exactly? I don’t know what you’re asking.”

Sherlock rolled his eyes. “Of course not. Come on, then, before someone sees.”

Without another word on the matter, Sherlock slinked across the street as though perfectly at home, with John again chasing after him if for no other reason than something resembling begrudged curiosity. He caught up to Sherlock as the detective was reading a notice of some sort taped to the door.

“What are we doing here?” John repeated.

“It’s going to be a community center by summer,” Sherlock said, again answering questions that no one was asking. “How very benevolent. No harm in a peek inside, then.”

“I’m sorry, are we breaking and entering for no reason now? How old are we?” He was cold, he was tired, and perhaps most importantly, he was angry with his sister and wanted very much to go back to Baker Street and go to sleep and forget about the whole mess. Why that was too much to ask at this moment, John had no idea.

Sherlock tried the doorknob. When the door swung open with a defeated groan that echoed through the darkness inside, he turned back to John with a triumphant grin.

“It begs investigation,” Sherlock said. “I needn’t even pick a lock. Come on, Old Misery, where’s your sense of adventure?”

“Somewhere back in 1992, I would imagine, with the rest of my arsenal of teenage pranks,” John snapped. “It’s freezing out. I’m going to find somewhere in wherever the hell we are to hail a cab, and I’m going back to the flat. If you’re murdered by territorial squatters, I’m not coming to your funeral.”

“You say that as though it would be the first time I’d even been threatened by a homeless man, John, honestly,” Sherlock said. He pushed the door the rest of the way open, and stood there with his arm propped against it as though holding it ajar for John.

John considered his options. He could leave and hope for a cab at this hour, and go home and go to bed angry, and start the whole sorry process over again the next day. He could argue with Sherlock in the cold. Or he could see what Sherlock was up to which, at the moment, seemed to be the least objectionable choice.

John cleared his throat. “One question: is there a point to this other than boredom?”

Sherlock considered. “Consider it an experiment.”

“Five minutes, Sherlock. Five. I’m counting,” John told him, checking his watch.

“Five minutes,” Sherlock repeated. “And if you still want to leave, then we’ll leave.”

And so the two of them entered the abandoned building, which from what John could tell had once been a flat not entirely different from the one at Baker Street. Somewhere along the way, someone had decided they loved their building and its tenants far less than Mrs. Hudson did, and so it had come to this. This dingy, musty smelling building with a door that sounded as though it was in pain and windows that had been long since smashed out, letting moonlight filter in through them. Boards had been placed over them at some point and some still hung feebly on here and there, but it hardly mattered. Another snow or rain and they were surely done for, John thought.

The floorboards creaked beneath their feet, and he followed Sherlock to what had once been a small parlor adjacent the stairs. Two armchairs and a sofa remained, dulled and grayed by time and weather, covered with tattered sheets of plastic that moved about in the wind. A coffee table was still situated between the chairs and the sofa, and on it were several empty beer bottles and burnt-out candles that suggested teenagers breaking and entering for a party some time back.

“Well?” John asked. “It’s a broken down flat.”

“Well deduced.” Sherlock was across the room already, glancing out one of the gaping windows to the street below. After a few moments, he turned his attention to a left-behind bookshelf with only remnants of its former contents left behind, still parked against pale, peeling wallpaper. John stood near the coffee table so that the room didn’t seem quite so dim. He watched Sherlock in silence for a moment. A single gloved hand moved over a coffee mug left sitting on one of the shelves.

Sherlock picked up the mug and stared down at it, and his brow furrowed as though he was determined to extract its secrets somehow. He inhaled sharply and rotated the mug in his hands, cradling it almost delicately for a moment. Sherlock blinked once and gave the mug one last lingering stare.

And then, just as suddenly as Sherlock’s fascination with the mug had begun, it mutated into something new and perhaps more frightening, and John watched Sherlock’s fingers tighten around the white ceramic. He reared back and flung it at the far wall in a sudden, unexpected motion, and it shattered against peeling wallpaper behind John.

“Jesus Christ, Sherlock!” John did his best to keep his voice down. His heart pounded with the shock of the sudden noise. He glanced back at the spot on the wall that apparently had it coming, and then down to the wreckage of the mug on the floor. His eyes fell back to Sherlock after a moment, and the detective’s eyes were glued to the broken ceramic pieces on the floor.

“When I was seven years old, I announced over family dinner one evening that my father smelled of another woman’s perfume,” Sherlock said, his voice even and calm despite his sudden assault on the ceramic cup. John stared at him, aware that his mouth was slightly agape at the words. There weren’t explicit rules, more or less, about their friendship, but one of the unspoken ones as far as John could figure out was that Sherlock did not like discussing his childhood. John guessed it was either because it was unpleasant or because Sherlock didn’t consider it relevant, and now, he was beginning to understand which precisely it was.

“Oh. Oh God.” John was not sure whether he was meant to laugh at Sherlock’s statement or somehow console him, and so he settled for neither.

“I’ve never quite deleted the look on my mother’s face, because it was the first time anyone ever looked at me with that kind of resentment,” Sherlock said. “Of course she didn’t blame me, because I was too young to know any better. And then I wonder if it would have made any difference to me if I did.”

It was more than Sherlock had said about his childhood in the entire time John had known him, and John briefly wondered – but did not ask – if this was where the feud between Sherlock and Mycroft had begun.

At last, Sherlock shrugged, and turned his attention back to John. “Your turn.”

“My…sorry?” John was still internally reeling from Sherlock’s sudden and unexpected confession, and the shift of attention back to himself caught him off guard every bit as much as the mug’s sudden demise had.

Sherlock turned back to the shelf. “Let’s see…cheap knockoff crystal vase, empty picture frame, or ornamental lucky cat.”

Realization crept into the corners of John’s mind. He considered, and shrugged. “The vase.”

Sherlock tossed it to him. The crystal was worth next to nothing, or else someone breaking in would have taken it long ago. Somehow, that made this feel justified. John thought for a long while, and ran his fingers along the uneven etching of the vase.

“My mum died when I was twenty. I spent her funeral watching after my drunken sister. Weeks spent by her bedside, watching her suffer, and Harry couldn’t be bothered until it was time to throw herself dramatically on a casket,” John said. There was that old resentment again, ugly and raw as the day it had developed. Before that day, Harry had been the “wild child” of the two of them. The partier. The drinker. From that day, though, she was a drunk.

John held onto the anger for a moment longer and then, just as Sherlock had done, flung the vase against the far corner, letting it shatter. The pieces glittered upon impact in the moonlight, and Sherlock took a cautious step back to allow the pieces to settle.

Sherlock produced a small switchblade from the pocket of his coat. He pulled the plastic tarp away from the sofa, and opened the switchblade. It looked sharp even in the darkness of the parlor, and Sherlock, in a single, nearly elegant motion, dragged the blade across the back of the sofa, creating a large rip in it. Stuffing poked out as though the furniture had been disemboweled.

“I’m an addict. I’m not quite sure how I’m still alive, to be perfectly honest,” Sherlock said. “Sometimes I still want to use so badly that I can’t think of anything else, and I hate that feeling and I just want to give in. Cat or picture frame?”

By now, John had ideas of his own, and he shook his head. He swore that Sherlock smiled, ever so briefly, but he could not be sure. John shoved one of the armchairs over onto its back on the floor, and brought his leg down against it hard enough that one of its wooden legs ripped away and broke free. He knelt and picked it up.

“The only time I’m ever comfortable is when I’m in the middle of a battlefield. That can’t be normal, can it? It can’t be right,” John said. He flung the broken chair leg out of the window and into the street, and Sherlock watched it go.

“I’ve seen half a dozen therapists and no two can agree,” Sherlock said, wandering back over to the bookcase. He seemed to consider the lucky cat for a moment, and then the picture frame. He decided on the picture frame, and lifted it from the shelf. “Sociopath. Schizoid. Narcissist. Asperger’s. Unresolved childhood issues. Freak.” He spat the last word, and flung the frame out of the window in pursuit of the broken chair leg.

Their eyes met as they both waited for the satisfying sound of the glass shattering on the pavement that came only seconds later.

“Where do you suppose they keep the kitchen?” John asked.

They found the kitchen. They found cupboards still filled with glass and ceramics and drawers filled with wonderfully noisy utensils. Sherlock broke a kitchen chair against the wall and its feeble wooden frame shattered into splinters. John responded by yanking out the drawer of flatware and shaking it out onto the ground, and then tossing the drawer through what was left of the glass in a small window perched over the sink. Sherlock stabbed a knife clean through the table, which John then managed to break in two by somehow hoisting up an old microwave high enough to break through the pressed particle board. Both of them busied themselves by ripping the still intact wallpaper down from wall to wall, and John found the sensation of the crumbling paper tearing free beneath his hands somehow soothing.

Sherlock found his way onto one of the counters and discovered china packed away atop one of the cabinets, and he emptied the box onto the floor in a cacophony of cracking ceramic. The pieces that didn’t shatter on impact, John stomped on and broke for himself. They saved the old, rickety china cabinet against the far wall for last, and each of them took a side, grinned at the other, and heaved forward as hard as he could. The cabinet gave a defeated groan as it crashed down against the remnants of the table, and the sound of breaking glass shrieked out through the dying house.

They did not speak anymore. Their seemingly mutual quest for destruction had replaced the need for conversation. The sounds of the house at their mercy came together in such a way that made up a language all their own. The symphony of breaking plates and splintering wood and frantic footsteps on squeaking floors came together in a song of distress that said more than the English language would have been able to.

There were water-damaged books in the master bedroom, and John ripped them apart and let the pages fly through the air. Sherlock tore down what was left of the curtains and tossed them aside. A desk was next, and they ripped it apart together, stomping it and throwing pieces aside in a flurry of movement. John threw a lamp at the wall through the maze of old smelling feathers newly released from a nearby pillow. He ripped the drawers out of the dresser and Sherlock yanked down the rack in the closet, and used what he could salvage of the metal to break a mirror hanging lopsided on the wall.

In the living room, there was more furniture, and John didn’t feel cold at all anymore. It was perhaps a result of physical exertion; more likely, though, was that it was the result of the linens Sherlock had begun burning in the fireplace. John broke down the coffee table and a stray kitchen chair found there for further kindling, and threw them in along with some old magazines he found. They toppled another bookshelf. Sliced chairs to ribbons. And at last, two pairs of eyes came to rest on an ancient television set sitting in a darkened corner of the room. Sherlock nodded as though making a polite gesture.

John found his voice again, and he leaned against the wall for a moment, eyeing the television. “All the horrific things we see, all the lives lost to whatever insanity is out there, and my sister wants to drink herself to death. I want to love her, I do. But I’m not going to watch her kill herself.”

John picked up a disembodied chair leg from the floor not far away, and clenched it tightly in his fist. He thought back to Harry’s half-hearted apology and that tear-strained voice. He swung the chair leg hard at the television screen, and the glass shattered. He sucked in a breath and then nodded to Sherlock. Together, they grabbed hold of the ancient equipment and hoisted it up onto the edge of the windowsill. Both of them were panting against the night air, their breaths coming quick and in puffs of smoke in the darkness. The small fire they had created, now dying off, cast shadows on the walls, onto both of their faces.

They stopped for a moment to catch their breath and then, in silent agreement, they tilted the television out of the window. They rushed to crowd together in the window to watch the doomed television hit the sidewalk below. There was, John realized, something fulfilling about the mess of wires, glass shards, and wood paneling as it shattered against concrete, and a glance at Sherlock confirmed a similar childlike delight in the chaos. They lingered like that for a moment, huddled together at the window and taking in the sight of the mess they had caused.

In less than a minute, police sirens sounded in the distance, and Sherlock was back on the move. John followed, knowing that no doubt a neighbor had heard all the noise and phoned the authorities. John took one last look around the newly devastated living room, sucked in a deep breath, and then took off down the stairs after Sherlock. They ran as fast as they could, and not for the first time in their lives.

When John dropped down onto the sofa in their flat half an hour later, he was grateful for the fire Mrs. Hudson had no doubt tended to while they were gone. More than ever, tonight 221B felt like home. It was impossible for John to imagine it in disrepair, with plastic covering the furniture and bookshelves hollowed. He could not imagine anyone stumbling upon a skull affixed to a mantelpiece in an abandoned building and wondering who had left it behind.

Sherlock put the kettle on in silence, and John took the moment of quiet to process what new information he had gained back at the derelict house on the corner. His earlier anger with Harry seemed, at least for now, like a distant and much dulled memory. And yet the last confession he had made to Sherlock, he decided, would be the very thing he said to Harry when she called hung-over and guilty the next day. It was the truest thing he could think of to tell her, and so, he reasoned, that’s exactly what he would do.

It occurred to John that Sherlock had been saying something from the doorway of the kitchen, and he snapped back to the current time at the sound of the other man’s voice.

“I’m sorry?”

“I said I think I have a splinter,” Sherlock said.

“So get rid of it,” John told him.

“You’re my doctor. You get rid of it,” Sherlock said. “It probably comes as no surprise that everything necessary for surgery is available right here in this very kitchen.”

It wasn’t, in fact, a shock at all. And it wasn’t, in fact, an especially small splinter that had embedded at some point into Sherlock’s right palm, and John wondered if it had occurred before or after the toppling of the china cabinet. As he used tweezers to pull the rather large sliver of wood out of Sherlock’s hand and deposited it on a napkin on the table, he smiled at the memory of crashing china, somehow comforting now where it wouldn’t have been before.

“Feeling better?” Sherlock asked, his expression remaining unchanged when John poured antiseptic over the wound.

John realized that their side trip hadn’t been about boredom or experiments at all, but rather had been Sherlock’s unique solution to John’s ever increasing frustration with Harry. It had been building for some time and Sherlock, for whatever reason, had created his own personal brand of therapy that was, as far as John was concerned, more effective than any psychiatrist who packed herself away in a neat, well-manicured, unnervingly silent office. Sherlock’s solution laid in something much simpler and far dustier, in gutted houses and darkened streets and mad dashes for home in the middle of the night.

For a moment John was compelled to ask how many derelict houses Sherlock had abused in the past, and whether it was an activity he had ever shared with anyone before. He had a feeling he already knew the answer to at least the second part of his question.


End file.
